CRN Fast50: Artis Group searches for a benchmark

Peter Giudes ascribed Artis Group's success since he founded it with just five staff four years ago to being small enough to deliver personal service while attaining enough scale to tackle complex jobs.

Entering the CRN Fast50 was part of a broader agenda in the business to continually prove its mettle, Giudes said.

"We continually seek to benchmark our success, through industry participation and conducting customer satisfaction surveys," said Giudes, Artis' co-founder and managing director.

"This is just another way by which we can measure our organisation. It is only through such benchmarking that we can focus our continual improvement efforts."

Giudes was no stranger to awards, having headed the team that was 2008 IBM Solution Provider of the Year and which won the Ingram Micro 2008 Enterprise Solutions Award Solution of the Year.

The St Leonards business that's about six kilometres north of the Sydney CBD has 60 staff spread across five groups - IBM infrastructure, Microsoft application development and integration, collaboration, infrastructure support and implementation and project management.

Giudes said Artis was founded to "build a successful IBM business partner and to provide a high-performance team of known IT professionals".

"As a Microsoft Gold Certified partner we provide product implementation, integration and application development services," he said.

"Our second practice is collaboration where we help organisations share information and communicate internally utilising the same technology and systems we use to successfully deliver our projects."

These "Web 2.0" approaches deliver "massive efficiency savings" for Artis clients, Giudes said.

Infrastructure is Artis' biggest practice, supporting critical systems for the big end of town "down to single-server implementations".

"Our experience with standard operating environments, networking and virtualisation support our server-platform skills," he said.

"Finally, we provide a wide range of project services that help our clients supplement their permanent skill base from project managers to trainee testers and everything in between."

Giudes aspired to make Artis an "internationally successful" systems integrator, to stay Australian owned and not lose its "client-centric approach".

Giudes supported his faith in that last philosophy through his personal goals: "My wife and I are renovating a house which renews my perspective of what it's like being a client and having to deal with a vendor (in this case, a builder) on a complex project that is important to me."